


Little Puppet Made of Pine

by ConnivingOphelia



Category: Pinocchio (1940)
Genre: Angst, Existential Angst, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, M/M, Underage Drinking, Underage Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-12
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2021-01-29 06:15:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21405535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConnivingOphelia/pseuds/ConnivingOphelia
Summary: On Pleasure Island, in a quiet moment between the manic violence and the transformative horror, Pinocchio and Lampwick explore what it means to be real.
Relationships: Lampwick/Pinocchio
Comments: 4
Kudos: 26





	Little Puppet Made of Pine

The carnival music wavers in the darkness outside the window. Eerie melodies float up the litter-strewn alleys and wobble like a drunkard’s unsteady steps. It sounds like one of Papa Gepetto’s clocks in need of repair, winding down on warped gears. Pinocchio stares into the stein in his hand. Only a thin veneer of leftover foam coats the glass. With movements as wavering as the limping calliope strains outside, he drops the mug onto the table with a thunk.

“Havin’ a good time, Slats?”

Lampwick slides into the chair beside him, drops a new drink in front of Pinocchio and props himself up on his elbow. Pinocchio wants to reach for the mug, but he can’t look away from Lampwick’s wry, bucktoothed grin. “Yeah, I am.”

“It’s fun being’ bad, ain’t it.” 

With the unintelligible voices of the boys outside all but gone, Lampwick’s words drift into a softer, lower cadence. The beer has smoothed over his edges of the manic energy he only barely contained in the carriage and unleashed into the crowds and the violence of the Island. He tilts his head toward Pinocchio like his neck has grown too sleepy to hold it upright anymore.

“Yeah, Lampy. It’s real fun.” Pinocchio hefts the mug toward his mouth and the foam pours over the sides, splashes onto his hand. He spills even more as he lowers it back to the table and settles it into the small puddle he’s created. “I love it.”

When Pinocchio lifts his hand to suck on his beer-soaked fingers, he catches Lampwick’s eye. At the sudden change of expression on his friend’s face, Pinocchio forgets how to breathe. All he can do is stare, his fingers hovering forgotten at his lips, as he watches Lampwick’s eyes grow narrow and hungry, pupils dark, eyebrows drawn. Like Honest John seducing him the wrong way down the cobblestone path. Like Stromboli taking inventory of his piles of coins and the new little performer kneeling on the table before him.

Lampwick blinks hard and sits up, and the hungry look on his face fades back into his usual grin. “And you’re a natural too. You was trashing the place with the best of ‘em. Swingin’ that ax like a fuckin’ pro.”

Pinocchio’s breath catches and he has to look away, down at the foam that still seeps down the side of his stein. He can still feel the heft of the ax’s weight in his arms. The terrifying thrill as it slammed into the mahogany table in front of him. The wood shards flying back into his face with every ferocious cut. Lampwick, gleefully defacing works of art, had laughed at the tears that squeezed out of Pinocchio’s eyes as the lifeless wood shattered. 

In one long swig, Lampwick downs the rest of the beer and tosses his empty mug toward the wall. Pinocchio startles at the crack as the handle snaps off, but the rest of the mug tumbles to the floor in one piece. Lampwick snarls in the direction of the failed destruction, then turns back to the table. “I got to say, it was kind of crazy, watching a fuckin’ puppet go berzerkers on wooden furniture. Just smash right through it like your own self ain’t made of the same stuff.” He reaches out and snags Pinocchio’s wrist in his hand, runs his fingers along the planed surface. “Same exact stuff. But you didn’t give a shit. It was crazy.” He pauses. “It was kinda hot.”

Beneath the movement of Lampwick’s fingers, Pinocchio’s wrist feels almost _real_, almost alive with pulsing veins beneath the surface. The body heat spreads into him as if the warmth is his own. He shakes his hand free. “It wasn’t the same exact stuff. That was mahogany.”

“What’s the damn difference?”

Pinocchio picks up his mug and tries to drain the rest like Lampwick, but it takes him several sputtering gulps before he gets it all down. He tries to fling the empty mug at the same wall; it falls two feet short and lands on the floor with a hollow thud. “I’m _ pine_,” he mumbles.

Lampwick snorts. “It’s all _ trees_, ain’t it?” He takes a step closer, just the slightest waver in his movements. In spite of how hard he tries to keep up his appearance of swaggering bravado, all those drinks finally seem to be catching up. “I just got a kick outta seeing you have fun. Seeing you be bad.” A smile spreads across his face like spilled beer puddling on the tabletop. “What d’you think, Slats? You wanna be bad some more?”

Pinocchio studies his face, searching for a hint of Stromboli’s sadistic malice. But the hunger he sees is rooted in something gentler. It sends a thrill down through Pinocchio’s body the way he’s being _ studied_, the same excitement on his friend’s face as the delighted strangers who watch the miracle of his independent movement, who hang on every syllable of his impossible speech. Performing for strangers always pulls the spotlight onto his illusion -- _ look at the puppet, it’s almost real. _But here and now, Lampwick runs his eyes over Pinocchio as if he can dismantle the fabrication, brush away the unrealness and find a hidden humanity somewhere beneath. “Okay, Lampy.”

Lampwick’s mouth tastes like the beer; Pinocchio can pick out the distinct sweetness of the grain against the bitter tang of the hops flowers, can nearly taste the soil where the barley twined its roots as the shoot germinated and sprouted. It tastes like a memory from another lifetime. A pang of unexpected aching twists through him, homesick for something he can’t remember, longing for something he’s never had. He moans into Lampwick’s mouth.

In answer, Lampwick laughs, a soft chuckle that vibrates through the trunk of Pinocchio’s body. He pushes Pinocchio to the floor without breaking their kiss, struggles out of his own clothes and coaxes Pinocchio out of his. Their limbs bump together like wind-tossed branches. Lampwick pauses. “All right?”

Half-pinned under his friend’s body, Pinocchio wills himself to keep breathing, to open his eyes. He knows he’s not in Stromboli’s jostling carriage, that the room’s swaying is all in his own head, too much drink, too many intrusive memories. He makes himself focus hard on his friend’s face, on the throbbing beat of the jugular in his slender neck, the delicate bird-bones of his jutting clavicle. Lampwick’s skin is pale and stretched tight over his wiry and malnourished frame. For all his posturing toughness, his body looks made of balsa wood, fragile and weightless and readily fractured. Pinocchio reaches out one tentative hand and runs his fingers down Lampwick’s chest to the sharp planes of his hipbones, imagining how Papa Gepetto could have engineered this body with more structural integrity. “Yes. I’m all right.”

Outside, the unsteady carnival music staggers and slows until Pinocchio can’t discern a melody anymore. He listens instead to Lampwick’s breaths, to the tiny groans he makes with each hungry kiss over the length of Pinocchio's body.

“God,” Lampwick murmurs into the joint of Pinocchio’s hip, “you smell like fucking Christmas.”

A short laugh erupts before Pinocchio can stop himself. “Pine.”

“Christmas,” Lampwick repeats, even softer this time. When he lifts his head and meets Pinocchio's eyes, the tough-guy facade has fallen away completely, leaving his face almost unrecognizably soft and sleepy-eyed. Pinocchio swallows hard over the lump of envy that forms in his throat at the sight, at the contradiction that someone _ real _could shift and transform like that into something entirely new.

The music drifts off into silence. Or perhaps they just can’t hear it anymore over their own noises. Pinocchio surprises himself; he thought he’d keep quiet, thought his body would retain the sensation of Stromboli’s huge hand clamped over his mouth. But instead he’s even louder than Lampwick’s whimpered blasphemies. “Yes,” he moans, an answer to questions neither of them vocalized. “Yes yes yes.”

“_Madonna_,” Lampwick breathes. It sounds more like a supplication than a curse, like he’s back in parochial school, pressed in prayer against the slick wood curves of a church pew.

There are faint shouts somewhere in the distance of Pleasure Island, an indistinct commotion that sounds vaguely like donkeys braying. Pinocchio barely notices, focusing instead on the rise and fall of Lampwick’s chest where he rests his head. He stares at the protrusions of Lampwick’s ribcage, the ripples like a forest root system running just beneath the top layer of woodland soil. 

“Say, Pinoke,” Lampwick mumbles. His words slur together in the haze of drunken, sated sleepiness. “D’you remember before you were a wooden puppet?”

Pinocchio lifts his head, but Lampwick keeps his eyes closed. “Before--?”

“Yeah. Like when you was still, you know, a tree. Can you remember that shit?”

How to explain what it was like in that hazy consciousness before the wishing star? To live in the forest of Italian stone pines, sunlight pouring life into his needles, water streaming through the soil-cocooned roots. To feel whole civilizations of insects crawling across his trunk, to whisper to the enormous collective of other trees with their vibrations carrying through the wind, into the waiting boughs, in endless conversation. And now to be trapped in this limbo, cut off from what he used to be, but still hovering on the edge of what he wanted so badly. Struggling to immerse himself into humanity and making one mistake after another. He lowers his head back down on Lampwick’s chest. “Yes. I can remember.”

Lampwick laughs. “That’s wild, Slats.”

Pinocchio doesn’t answer. He holds perfectly still, his ear pressed against the contradiction of Lampwick’s bare chest, bony yet soft, a fragile cage somehow protecting the thrumming life within. His heartbeat pulses against Pinocchio’s ear, steady and insistent. _ Real, real, real, real. _


End file.
